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Category: random

The driver of a DeLorean modded to resemble the version from Back to the Future didn’t impress a Texas state trooper for hitting 88 mph.

Mark Shields, who was driving his car to an event, told KHOU he thought the officer was joking when he pulled him over for the time-traveling speed. Shields said the trooper responded by saying he doesn’t “joke” about his job.

Shields said the trooper continued to ask about the car and questions related to the movie, but ultimately handed the butthead a ticket.

During World War II, the Allies feared that Germany was on the brink of creating an atomic bomb. To prevent this, they launched a dramatic midnight commando raid to destroy a key piece of equipment in the mountains of southern Norway. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll remember Operation Gunnerside, “one of the most daring and important undercover operations of World War II.”

We’ll also learn what to say when you’re invading Britain and puzzle over the life cycle of cicadas.

A woman carrying shopping bags in each hand slips on an icy sidewalk and slams onto her back. Then a good samaritan in a black car skids to a stop, and who pops out to help? Santa! This comically heartwarming video was caught by a dashcam of another car passing by.

Neuroscientist Nicho Hatsopoulous and his team taught monkeys that lost limbs through accidents how to control a robotic arm. The work has profound implications on what they call the brain-machine interface.

“That’s the novel aspect to this study, seeing that chronic, long-term amputees can learn to control a robotic limb,” said Nicho Hatsopoulos, PhD, professor of organismal biology and anatomy at UChicago and senior author of the study. “But what was also interesting was the brain’s plasticity over long-term exposure, and seeing what happened to the connectivity of the network as they learned to control the device.”

Here’s the basic setup in a similar lab with non-amputee monkeys. The monkey gets juice or some other treat for successfully completing the tasks.

Critics hate The Orville, Seth McFarlane’s uncanny love letter to Star Trek and The Next Generation, but they love the gloomy, ultra-2017 Star Trek: Discovery. Viewers love The Orville, though, while remaining divided on and indifferent to the new official series.

The critics are mistaken; the viewers are right. I was surprised at how intimately Seth McFarlane — Seth McFarlane! — is tuned into Gene Roddenberry’s sense of humanity’s future potential and why it’s OK to have a shipful of lovers. It’s TNG with dick jokes! And, let’s face it, the time is right for some happy technocommie utopian SF.